Kiyotaka Oshiyama’s ‘Look Back’ is the most striking anime of the year

In the film, we first meet the character in the aforementioned shot: hunched over a desk in the dark, compulsively tapping her foot while figuring out a drawing. Cut to elementary school the next day, she’s relishing in the praise for her comic in the school newspaper, boasting that she casually made it in five minutes (she didn’t).

That pride feels natural for a kid who is constantly told they’re the best at what they do, so of course Fujino reacts with terror when she realizes that there’s another younger kid in the fourth grade, Kyomoto, a recluse and absentee from class, who is better at drawing than she is. A hilarious shot shows their four-panel comics work in direct contrast with each other: on the left, Fujino’s silly and macabre parody, made with a rather charming crudeness. On the right, a series of incredibly well-drawn empty spaces, appearing mysterious thanks to its lack of accompanying dialogue.

Fujino’s distraught reaction also betrays a lack of realization of the specific value of her talents in only the sixth grade—a natural sense for comic timing. But perhaps it’s also frustration, at a gulf between what she imagined and the final result of her work. Director, screenwriter and Studio Durian co-founder Kiyotaka Oshiyama—who had also worked on “devil design” on the popular anime adaptation of Chainsaw Man—highlighted this aspect, in a conversation over Zoom about the film (with thanks to his interpreter, Satsuki Yamashita). He relates it back to the opening, where the comic jumps both feet first into the classroom scene, Oshiyama is interested in the process, connecting to Fujino not just for the fact that they both drew manga in elementary school (“I was known to be pretty good at it,” he adds), but how much work it takes.

“There's a lot of various themes that I wanted to put in,” he says. “But I think the one that's easiest to understand is Fujino's efforts, like how much she put into manga creating, is what I really wanted to highlight.” He does this through that simple addition to the “five minutes” gag. “I inserted a scene where Fujino is struggling at night to, you know, come up with that four panel manga. She has a lot of ideas in her head, and it's really just a struggle of how to put it in on paper.” The changes immediately open up what was quite a personal work into something perhaps more reflective of the universal experiences of the process of creating things, though it still paid deference to the scenes shown in the comic.

Still, part of the thrill of watching any anime adaptation of manga is seeing the directors’ embellishments and what they add to the gaps readers experience between panels. One of the most striking examples in Look Back is an animation sequence depicting the story of Fujino’s comic, or at least, the conception of it—Oshiyama making clearer the gulf between what she imagined and what she created. Speaking about the making of that particular sequence, Oshiyama says, “I tried to really think about how she imagined it. And because Fujino’s art isn't as good as Kyomoto, I also try to imagine what a fourth grader would be able to draw at their age.”

Part of the thrill of watching any anime adaptation of manga is seeing the directors’ embellishments and what they add to the gaps readers experience between panels.

Some of the embellishments are just for fun. Oshiyama mentions as an aside that the score in this scene animating Fujino’s art, from musician haruka nakamura, “uses instruments that would be found in Japanese elementary schools,” a change from the more atmospheric approach for the rest of the film. But it also has some other fun insights into the character through the voice acting.

“So in the Japanese cast, I was really specific about casting whomever,” Oshiyama says. “But Fujino’s character is a movie lover—she’s inspired by a lot of the movies that she watches. So she's been watching a lot, but when she watches western movies, they would be dubbed in Japanese. I chose to cast the voice actors in her four-panel manga, as voice actors who were constantly doing the Japanese dubs of western movies around that time.” That would be Maaya Sakamoto and Toshiyuki Morikawa, who often dubbed roles for Natalie Portman, and Tom Cruise, respectively.

Tying back to the things Fujino sees in her head, in the films she wants to emulate, her frustration at the detail of Kyomoto’s drawings comes into sharper relief—which also makes their subsequent friendship all the sweeter as they learn how to create manga and go through the grind together.

When asked if he had anyone that he had a similarly close creative partnership with, Oshiyama remarks, “creating anime is fundamentally a collaborative process, so it’s standard to work with various partners on different projects.” He continues, “but when I worked with Takashi Kojima on Flip Flappers [an anime series Oshiyama directed in 2016], I felt a similar connection with him that reminds me of Fujino and Kyomoto. We split the roles with me as the director while Takashi Kojima was the character designer and chief animation director. We got through the grueling TV series production together.”

Referring to a previous project as  “grueling” might seem odd in relation to a film where so much of the news around it has to do with the director’s multitasking, and the relatively small scale production. (The main team at Studio Durian have barely a dozen key animators and second key animators listed in the credits.)

Oshiyama is quick to highlight the advantages of working this way. “I was granted a lot of discretion by taking on multiple roles in this project,” he says, having tackled character design, animation direction and key animation, as well as writing and directing. “This allowed me to proactively incorporate ideas that came to mind during the production process while assuming full responsibility for them.” As well as being able to change things directly on the fly, it also meant some freedom to work in the way that they wanted—highlighting the coloring process as one example. “In Japanese animation production, the way we have the system now, it's really hard for people in the animation process to just start coloring directly on the key animation.” Oshiyama adds that a lot of key animators would, if possible, prefer to do this, and “because this film was just done with a small team, we were able to color directly on the key art. I think the line may look a little bit rough, but also each piece of key art actually captures the essence of the scene.” 

The ambition of Look Back, according to Oshiyama, stems from his work on an earlier short film, Shishigari (which premiered at Fantasia Festival, but is unfortunately unavailable to watch online). “We made it self-financed, it was only 17 minutes but, you know, it was a short film and I did all the key art and the animation, on my own. And I think that took about three to four months.” Since he managed 17 minutes in four months, Oshiyama figured that since Look Back would only be around 60 minutes, he wouldn’t need a significant increase in the size of the team. He goes on to praise his “amazing staff” for the pace with which they worked on the feature, and credits the organization of their producer Nagano for keeping costs low.

There are times when Look Back feels like indie animation given room to expand, and that alone makes it fascinating viewing on a big screen when so much of anime, when you’re not a director with significant cultural cache, is hooked to big franchise tie-in films and big knockout shonen battles. (Though, the name recognition that comes with being the author of Chainsaw Man probably moved things along). In any case, it’s creative and beautiful in its interpretation of a story which was already deeply moving, for its self-reflexive story of an artist considering their craft anchored to a bittersweet story of friendship. There may be flashier animated films out this month, but none quite so affecting.